Do It By Heart

Friday, November 6, 2020 – Sunday, January 31, 2021
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest

“Do It By Heart​” is an intimate and abstract exploration of the possibility that language and different societal thinking and imagination patterns, understood as a collective heritage of pre-individual reality quota (1), can be approached as territories of encounters and productive confusions. If what we know by heart is anchored in language and discourse, in institutions and common cultural references, what we do by heart are the acts of encounter and contact with other subjectivities – not in a physical space, but in communality, in what we share involuntarily, without choosing and even without realizing (2).

In the exhibition context, communality refers not just to language and common cultural imagery, but also to literary references, ideological and politically driven visual legacies, the image and the protocols around common space in contemporary society, the image of work, of desirable bodies, of success, patterns of organizing our visual and aural public and corporate environments, and so on. Thus, the three large scale installations by Larisa Crunțeanu that cover the floor space of the museum become premises of encounters on a physical and theoretical plane, as well as background for a series of interventions by fellow artists and friends Irina Gheorghe, Adriana Gheorghe, Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Olivia Berkowicz & Marianna Feher, Catalina Insignares & Carolina Mendonça.

1.The term pre-individual quote refers more specifically to the concept of individuation, in light of Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy, revisited and reinterpreted in socio-political context by Paolo Virno. For Simondon, the individual is in a constant tendency to individuate, to become a singular in-divisible individual. But the process is never fully completed. And the tendency takes place both at a micro, atomic level and at a macro, supra-individual, collective level. Thus, individuation places all individuals in relations of interdependency in sub- and supra-conscious manners, and pushes subjectivity, that which is specifically individual, at the margin, the border of what we share with others. In other words, the individual is not a condition of individuation, but an effect of it. The following question follows: if what is before the individual is individuation, what precedes individuation? An individual qua, a slice of pre-individual reality that also gets caught in individuation processes. In other words, the collective and that which was produced by past individuations will also provide the premises and the raw material for future individuations. The main texts of reference in this sense are “L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information​” by Gilbert Simondon and “​A Grammar of the Multitude”​, by Paolo Virno.

2. In the unpublished and later reunited under the title ​Grundrisse​, Marx describes language as a product of a single individual as ”an absurdity […]. Language is at the same time the product of a community and itself the existence of a community, the existence in articulation”. [Karl Marx, ​Grundrisse​, apud Andrew Fiala, ​The Philosopher’s Voice​, 2002].

Curator: Sandra Demetrescu
Interventions by: Irina Gheorghe, Adriana Gheorghe, Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Olivia Berkowicz & Marianna Feher, Catalina Insignares & Carolina Mendonça
Image credit: Horațiu Șovăială